Google Chrome 66 will now stop autoplaying videos by default

Chrome 66 will take care of one annoying feature of websites.

Google has rolled out the next version of its Chrome browser for Mac, Windows, and Linux. With Chrome 66, one of the most annoying features of certain websites will be tamed. How many times have you found yourself in an odd situation when you would load a website only to have some video on its landing page playing with sound on by default? We all know the answer. Google Chrome 66 aims to fix just that.

With the major amount of our experience with the internet moving to videos, it is hard to find websites not hopping on the brigade and injecting videos, sometimes multiple of them, on the landing pages with the sound turned on. This holds true for plenty of news websites as well. If you are a first-time visitor, you might struggle initially to locate the video and turn off the sound or stop the video. Alternatively, you can also right click on the tab, and hit ‘Mute Site’. Previously the option was to ‘Mute Tab’. With the mute site option, it became convenient to restrict audio from websites.

In Chrome 66, it is now the job of the browser to keep the videos on such websites from running automatically. Before the panic occurs, the updated version would have already taken care of such videos in the first place. As VentureBeat notes, the feature was first slated to arrive with Chrome 64.

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It has been observed that certain autoplaying content is muted automatically, while some content with or without visible controls, does not begin playing. It has also been observed that the treatment of YouTube videos is not consistent either. In some instances, the browser allows them to play automatically, while in other cases, it stopped them from playing.

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Other than the new feature of disabling autoplaying videos or sound content, Google has also added security improvements and new developer features. Some of the developer features include ImageBitmap Rendering Context for the canvas tag, which streamlines objects by avoiding memory duplication. Chrome 66 also implements CSS Typed Object Model that exposes CSS values as typed JavaScript objects rather than strings, allowing developers to write more maintainable code.